The 'scandalous Memoirists'

This reappraisal of the "scandalous memoirists," Constantia Phillips and Laetitia Pilkington, overturns scholarship's traditional discrediting of them. Because their reputations for immorality led them to be despised and disbelieved, their revealing contributions of the period--of the law, of high and low society, of sexual mores, of women's attempts to bypass patriarchal prescription--have been obscured. Lynda M. Thompson credits the memoirists with sharply accurate criticism of their society's double standards and opportunistic stirring of public debate.